Predicting a long boom, driven by technology

A lot of VCs love Carlota Perez’s framework for understanding technological revolutions, financial bubbles and golden ages. Fred Wilson is a big fan, I wrote about her back in 2009, and now Marc Andreessen was talking about her in an interview he gave last month. He summarised her theory of development, bubble, crash and deployment like this:

First the new technology is not taken seriously at all. Then it’s taken way too seriously way too quickly – everybody gets too excited. Then there’s a gigantic catastrophe; and only then stuff actually starts happening.

That ‘stuff happening’ phase is where we’re at now, and it’s what Perez calls a ‘golden age’. Internet technologies are getting adopted at mass scale for real world functions that make money. Look at AirBnB, Uber, ASOS, King, and many others. Establishing the right regulatory framework is key to establishing a long golden age such as we had in the 1950s and 1960s and you can see governments the world over struggling to get that right now. If they do then we are in for another long boom.